Surgical gowns are primarily intended to protect surgical staff from contact with bodily fluids and/or medical solutions. To achieve this, the gowns are typically manufactured with materials that function as barriers to these liquids. These barriers also tend to restrict, or even prevent, the flow of air to the skin of the gown wearer making them uncomfortable.
Some gown designs seek to maintain the barrier in the most critical locations (e.g., chest and sleeves) while reducing the barrier in less demanding areas (e.g. back and sides) of the gown; thus, providing avenues for air permeation and circulation. These approaches include seaming together fabrics with different barrier properties (e.g. the gown's front having a high barrier material and the back having a material that provides less of a barrier but higher air permeability), or manually laminating a high barrier fabric/film patch (often referred to as a “reinforcement”) onto an area of the gown body.
A gown body may be a single high barrier material that is present throughout the entire gown body. The disadvantage with the single high barrier material embodiment is the lack of a pathway through the gown for air permeation/circulation.
Alternatively, a gown body may include seams where two different types of materials are sewn or sealed together so that the most critical areas on the gown (e.g., middle portion of chest) are made with barrier materials. The less demanding areas (e.g., sides and back) are made with a more air permeable, lower-barrier material to allow air circulation for the wearer. The seamed gown body design has several disadvantages. First, seams between different types of materials are often poor fluid barriers due to variability in manufacturing processes and the difficulty in achieving a continuous seal between the dissimilar materials. Seaming also requires additional material handling and manufacturing steps compared to a gown made from a single roll of fabric. This increases cost for labor, waste and variability in the manufacturing process.
Another current gown body has a barrier material that is glued in the form of a reinforcement to the most-critical area of the gown. While this design has no seams, laminating a barrier material reinforcement to a base material (e.g., a fabric) increases the number manufacturing steps, variability in product, labor cost, additional raw materials and waste from the process.